I am a Sting fan who is mad online

This website is a run by fans. It is for fans. It is all about being a fan of professional wrestling, even if we deliver news and rumors and reviews and are treated like a news source, even by WWE.

I say all that to say this: I’m going to be a complete mark fan and use this space to vent about the fact that I am a Sting fan and I am mad online right now.

This came about because our resident TNA expert, Kyle Decker, came to me in the Cageside offices and asked “are you going to feel a bit peeved if WCW guy Goldberg gets the title but WCW guy Sting gets the shaft his entire run?”

Oh, I’m already peeved, Decker, because let’s just come right out and say it: this is bullshit.

Sting showed up, after many, many years of flirting with coming to the company and almost always deciding not to do so because he was scared of what they would do to his character, in 2014. When he finally came around, it was because there was literally nothing left for him to do in pro wrestling and he might as well get a WrestleMania moment and a Hall of Fame induction before he called it quits for good.

His debut resulted in, at the time, the biggest traffic day in the history our website (it is now the second biggest day). People really cared that he had finally arrived.

So what did WWE do? They booked him to save Dolph Ziggler, had him wrestle Triple H in a mid-card match at WrestleMania, made him lose said match, then brought him back to do a job to Seth Rollins in a title match where he suffered a neck injury that ended his career.

As a lifelong fan of Sting and everything he’s ever represented, that alone is enough to make me bitter.

Fast forward a year and Goldberg makes his return after more than a decade away. How is he treated?

He immediately squashes Brock Lesnar — the first legitimate win over Brock since he broke Undertaker’s streak at WrestleMania — at Survivor Series before doing basically the same thing at Royal Rumble. Now, if rumors are to be believed, he’s about to win the Universal championship at Fastlane before wrestling Lesnar again at WrestleMania in what could very well be the main event of the show.

What utter and complete crap.

Perhaps WWE has metrics that indicate Goldberg is much better for their business than Sting ever was, and that’s fine, but his return did nothing for our numbers. The Stinger, though? He was always a traffic hit, no matter what he was doing.

Beyond that, and again I’m speaking simply as a fan here, it’s just lame. Goldberg has never been anywhere near as entertaining as Sting, with a character that has nothing close to the depth, and the gap in match quality is downright embarrassing, and that’s even admitting Sting was never one of the true greats in that regard. This is all without mentioning that Sting has, by all reports, never been anything but a pleasure to deal with professionally while Goldberg has been the complete opposite.

Sting deserved better. Sting deserved the run Goldberg, who absolutely doesn’t deserve it, is currently getting.

This sucks.